Vernal–Walking with the Dinosaurs

This is still a Utah adventure but the title is getting boring so I’ll drop it. We arrived in Vernal Saturday afternoon. Our campsite is right in town. Not nearly as nice as the one on Heber but it serves the purpose, is quiet, and is convenient to what we want to do.

First we went to the Utah Field House of Natural History. They have a lot of reconstructed dinosaurs and loads of information about all the periods and ages and so on. If I was a student of these things it would all have been very interesting. But as it was, it made a good introduction to the rest of the day.

Things like this greeted you as you entered. Notice the tail way back there to the right.

 

Things like this greeted you outdoors. These are three of the wild creatures they managed to capture.

Then it was off to see the bones. This is (actually, was) the site of an actual archeological dig. They call this the Wall of Bones.

Up close they look like this. There are hundreds and hundreds of these on the rock face.

Up even closer they look like this

All this is housed in this building. Because of limited parking, they transport you up in a shuttle.

An interested side note is that Joyce remembers stopping at a place like when she was a little girl traveling with her family from Oregon to visit relatives in Nebraska. Then it was a pole barn and they were actually digging out bones. A guide told us it was probably this place.

So why are all these bones here? According to legend – no, I mean according to the scientists, this was once laying flat. It was a stream bed where animals would go to drink. But a drought came and the stream dried up. The animals died, decayed and left their bones. Eventually the stream began to flow again and the current scattered their bones. There are no complete skeletons here. In some places you can see some leg bones almost connected to each other, or several sections of vertebrae together. There are so many bones in this whole area they decided to leave these for people to see – and none of them are unique.

The rocks are so different around here they are hard to describe. A picture will have to do. At the right of this picture is the Green River (yes, it is brown). This is a take-out point for rafters.

I am going to  break this post into two because I’m afraid it won’t upload if I put too much into it. So keep reading. The adventure continues.